Waiting lists and being from a small community were some of the challenges for Kaitlyn while trying to get the help she needed.
Transcript
Because I already knew her outside. So I think one of the biggest barriers potentially to getting help was the fact that I live in a small town and there’s so few healthcare providers. And yeah, just knowing everyone kind of really stopped that. I remember at one point when my son was about four months old. I did make an appointment to see a nurse practitioner. To speak with them, but I had to wait until April. And I just remember four months being too long, and I just was too busy taking care of my child. So I just said OK, I guess I’ll just wait and see what happens otherwise. And it just – it’s hard because I feel like it doesn’t seem that bad from the outside. Like nothing was really apparent that there was an issue with me and my child. But like the way I felt was just exhausting. And it was constantly on. And it was just having intrusive thoughts. And I also dealt with like postpartum rage. Which was very shocking to me, because I wasn’t even used to feeling like that. And you always hear about sad after having a baby. You don’t hear about how much rage you’ll have. So that was very surprising.
And there’s nothing in the area that you could attend in person. Like to give you a reference point like I live two hours from Saskatoon, or Regina. So like the other biggest city centre would be Yorkton which is an hour and a half away. So it’s just like not feasible to like just drive, or like you know, something. They have drop-in like mental health once a month in our clinic here, but I mean what do I do? Just go and say like I’m struggling, but I’m very like poor at articulating my issues so they’ll just – people have much like more obviously worse I guess? So I felt like that was just not going to be an option until I was potentially like in a crisis mode where I couldn’t cope anymore, but I think I just – the way I was conditioned and like because of the past trauma I’ve had in my life I’m just like a pretty like strong person. So I just like would never allow myself to happen. But if it was someone else? Like I feel like things would have escalated really horribly, and I’ve just been able to like maintain this amount of suffering for years.
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